SUCCESS STORY: Ray Morgan Company’s ProIT Builds on a Firm Foundation

SUCCESS STORY: Ray Morgan Company’s ProIT Builds on a Firm Foundation

Let’s face it. There are a lot of backup and recovery options on the market. A Wikipedia page comparing backup software lists more than 80 different products for protecting your data. As a solution provider, it can be difficult to filter through these options and find the best one for your needs. Which features are the most valuable? Which option will give you the greatest ROI?

For Michael Fraser, Director of Private Cloud for the Pro IT division of Ray Morgan Company (RMC), the choice is simple. “The whole issue of data recovery is really built around the image snapshot,” he said. For Fraser, anything beyond the initial snapshot, including how the backup is retrieved, is almost a technicality. Issues like where to write the backup—local or remote? physical or virtual?—are all matters of preference. But, as he says, “if the snapshot is there, the data is there.”

Of course, when it comes down to it, the snapshot is what matters. Anything that comes after depends entirely on the integrity of images made by these backup and disaster recovery (BDR) solutions. Certainly, when it comes to complete business continuity, sector-based backup and the disk images (or snapshots) at its core are becoming a necessity. A recent report by Gartner found that, when it comes to the number of applications companies consider business critical, the percentage is steadily growing. Fully 60% of the respondents claimed that more than 20% of their applications were mission critical (20% was the standard in the past). Almost 20% said that more than 50% of their applications were vital to their operation.{{1}} For companies like these, file-based backup software probably won’t meet their needs. They need software that can protect and recover all their data and applications with a minimum of fuss.

Of course not all sector-based backup software is created equal. Not all can recover data granularly. In many cases, they cannot restore to different kinds of hardware. So when Fraser talks about the importance of the snapshot, he’s not just talking about a simple backup. He’s talking about the foundation of an entire business continuity strategy.

The Pro IT division of RMC offers both managed and consulting services to a wide variety of organizations, including school districts, hospital systems, government entities and industries that have a lot to lose should a system failure occur. Like any managed service provider, ProIT and Fraser simply can’t afford to use software that might let them down. Fraser needs a solution that builds on the foundation of that great snapshot to create reliable BDR service and support full business continuity. According to Fraser, StorageCraft® ShadowProtect® does this.

“ShadowProtect is at least twice as fast, and far superior to everybody else out there,” he said. “The StorageCraft architects are the best in the industry. They have over 10 years of solid experience and development in snapshot technology and their snapshot imaging technology, one of the first ever developed, is still the best. With ShadowProtect, there is absolutely no guessing.”

According to Fraser, ShadowProtect is superior because StorageCraft takes the time to “do it right” so that the software “it does what it was engineered to do.”

“I have yet to see a failure,” he said. “I have done thousands of installs and it doesn’t matter what it’s on….I have seen less than five issues ever arising in a backup with ShadowProtect and those didn’t have anything to do with the product.”

For Fraser, the consistency of ShadowProtect is crucial for ensuring not only the safety of his clients’ data, but the loyalty of those clients as well.

“We installed a BDR solution for a client that was a property management company with over 100 associations in the database, each with thousands of records. Three weeks into it, they had a catastrophic hardware failure that completely wiped them out. We imaged a new server for them and they were completely operational inside of two hours. They’re a client for life.”

Of course, once you have flawless snapshots, it’s great to have a variety of ways to use and manage those images too. For Fraser, ShadowProtect delivers it all.

“Being able to leverage StorageCraft’s consolidation technology and replicate backups anywhere ‘out there’ [on the cloud] means closing the loop on a complete disaster recovery plan. People can have copies of servers they can get to from anyplace in the world. They can even run it off of a VM if they need to. It’s really only possible because of the superior snapshot technology from StorageCraft. I wouldn’t use any other BDR solution for that purpose.”

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